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Wednesday, March 14, 2018

Fire is the Best Teacher

It doesn’t waste time
with words or clucking tongues.

Fire beckons:
respect me,
use me,
warm your tired, rattling bones
by me.

The earliest memory
of my Mexican grandfather
who chain-smoked
Marlboros
was the accidental
cigarette burn
inflicted by
a tentative embrace.

I learned.

I watch wildfires
reduce drought-dry
California to crumbles
and check and double check
the burners on the stove,
the unattended curling iron.

It could all be over
just
like
that.

Fire
is passion
and force,
an overwhelming,
impossible to ignore
scream.

If you’ve only
been singed,
count yourself
lucky.

[Written for http://poetryblogroll.blogspot.com/2018/03/poets-united-midweek-motif-scream.html]

13 comments:

  1. Indeed, I am lucky. You have shown fire to be a master teacher in an elegantly laid out poem. A passion and a force.

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  2. Fire as scream works well here, B. Powerful poem.

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  3. Yeppers. Fires burn.

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  4. I can remember many years ago my mother-in-law decides to try a cigarette as everyone else was smoking. Within a few minutes the lounge room lace curtains were on fire! Fire certainly took advantage of the situation then!

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  5. This is AWESOME!!! One of your best, I think.

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  6. This is my favorite:

    "the accidental
    cigarette burn
    inflicted by
    a tentative embrace"

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  7. I once survived a fire in which I lost everything. Started over from scratch. Fire sweeps clean. Decades later, I now and then think of something that was lost in the fire........

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  8. Scream does have that force and passion. Fiery indeed.

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  9. This is incredibly subtle and magnanimous at the same time. Your penultimate verse drive home your point, and just nails it in place

    much love...

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  10. I got burned by cigarettes as a child too. My parents never put them down! Fire is a very scary force for sure.

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  11. and now, the mud from barren hillsides ~

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  12. This really resonated with me. My father was a firefighter, and I grew up terrified of fire.

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  13. Still incredible.

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